The Shotgun Arcana (42 page)

“I love my work.” The killer’s voice warbled and distorted as he began to drag Maude by the hair back into the torn tent. “And I want to start up again. We’ll have a spot of privacy in here, my girl.”

She took a deep breath and it cleared her foggy mind a tiny bit. She remembered Gran teaching her beside the ocean, part of her poison training—the first, most important part.

“If you deal in toxins, sooner or later you will get poisoned yourself,” Anne Bonny had said matter-of-factly. “Then you got two choices, get the shit out of your blood and body or die a stupid git. Now, first you need to imagine the foreign substance as a different color from your blood and body and then, just as I taught you how to control your heartbeat and your breathing, you slowly, slowly begin to gather all that bad color into your stomach. Slow, lass. Keep your heartbeat down; it’s the drum that summons the reaper. Calm, focus … you know how to keep calm, Maudie. Some poisons you may need to sweat out of you, and I’ll show you that, too, but for today, it’s your tummy, girl.”

Maude focused on her breathing, kept her heart rate low. It was easy—the drug was making her long for stupor and sleep. The drug was darkness, swirling inside her, and she slowly drew it to her belly, more and more with each deep breath. Away from her brain, from her limbs.…

There was a stinging slap to her face and her eyes popped open. The killer was above her, his knife close to her.

“No sleeping, my little strumpet,” the killer said. “I want you awake to enjoy this. Maybe I’ll send your ears to old Boss Highfather.… Maybe I’ll send him his new pet whore’s kidney instead. I love to play with the insides so! So many filthy ladies here, so much work. This town was made just for yours truly.…”

“Then … here’s a little welcoming gift for you,” Maude muttered and vomited most of the poison, and a good deal of bile, into the killer’s face. The man screamed and fell backward, dropping his knife. Maude caught the blade in one hand and drove a powerful finger strike into his solar plexus with the other hand. The Dove killer fell back on the ground, gasping for air and writhing in pain. Maude groaned and climbed slowly to her feet, the blade in her hand. She walked over to the killer and slowly dragged him out of the dark tent and back into the alleyway with his last victim. Maude shoved his bile-covered face into the face of the girl, her expression froze in fear. Maude placed the curved scalpel against his neck. The man’s heaving and gasping stilled.

“You look at her, you pathetic little man,” Maude said. She still felt the flush of the drugs in her, but she had most of her facilities back. Her voice, however, sounded like it belonged to someone other than her. The blade pressed tighter against his jowly throat. “What a mighty predator you are, you stub-dicked lick-spittle. What? No boasts now? Maybe I should give the sheriff your ears? You are nothing, you hear me, nothing!”

The killer slowly, carefully, wiped away some of the bile and vomit from his face with the black scarf and Maude realized it was Dr. Francis Tumblety she was holding at knifepoint. Tumblety looked up at her, his eyes wide with fear and hatred, glazed with madness. Maude experienced a dip of nausea, this creature, this … thing had been alone at her sick daughter’s bedside, had touched her with these bloodstained hands. The knife began to split the skin at his throat and Tumblety laughed. It was the sound of reason dying, the sound that made cats scream in the night.

“Your inferior, little brain can’t begin to comprehend my works,” Tumblety hissed. “I operate within the realms of cause and effect. I am a servant of the sacred geometry, the ancient rites. Five holds power—five points on the ancient seal, the murdering star! No stupid slag can understand the clockwork of eternity.”

“Let me speed you on the way to eternity, then, Doctor,” Maude said. “You are an aberration, a sickness. Ending you would be a gift, a mercy, to the universe.”

A pair of heavy iron cuffs thudded in the dirt by Tumblety’s knees.

“Please don’t do that,” a woman’s voice said. Maude looked up to see a slender woman dressed like a man in trousers, a bolero jacket and hat. Her long brown hair was up under the hat and to an untrained eye she would seem a man. She had a slender, delicate face and held a short-barreled revolver in her hand as she slowly advanced into the alley. “You are right, miss. He is all you said and more and he deserves to live in a cage like an animal and then dance on the end of a rope for all he’s done. Don’t let him drag you into his cesspool. Please cuff him and put that knife away.”

“Who are you?” Maude asked.

“The law,” the woman said. “My name is Kate Warne and I’m working with the sheriff. I’m sorry I wasn’t in time to save your friend here, but I swear to you, he’ll never hurt another girl. Please, let me do my job.”

“Let her do hers,” Rowan said to Kate, as she stepped out of the shadows behind Maude and Tumblety. “She’s a woman, like you, like me. There’s no justice for us. We’re fucking property. You think any judge, any
man,
will see justice done for a bunch of slaughtered whores? This ‘fine gentleman,’ this right bastard will walk and keep on killing more girls.”

Rowan moved to where she could see Maude’s face. Tumblety struggled a bit and Maude pressed the knife deeper into his skin, slid it closer to the fat, pulsing artery that would end his existence with the slightest slip. The madman stilled.

“The only justice for us is what you hold in your hand,” Rowan said. “Kill him. It’s a damn sight more merciful than he’d give you, or what he gave them.”

Maude looked down at the face of the squirming thing she held that aped at being human. The eyes gave it away, though. Caught here in its obscene act, its mask had fallen in the filth. Debating killing the mountain lion had been difficult; there was no difficulty here. Tumblety was far worse than any supernatural creature she had ever encountered—without a doubt, he was the worst monster she had ever seen. Monsters deserved to be slain.

“Everything your friend here just said is true,” Kate said. “I’ve been exactly where you are, miss, and I can tell you the decision I made still haunts me to this day.

“All I can offer to convince you not to do it is that he’s not human, and you are. The women he’s slain deserve an accounting in front of the law. This is his justice, not ours. A knife in a dark alleyway changes nothing, but dragging him into the light, making him account for his deeds, that just might. The law isn’t always fair and it’s not fair at all to us, but if we ever intend to change that, we have to show we can be … better than him. You are better than him.”

Maude looked at Tumblety. She slid the knife away from his throat and relief flooded the killer’s face. It was short lived. The curved knife dropped to between his legs and there was sharp ripping sound from Tumblety’s trousers. The killer screamed in pain.

“I am the Mother’s justice,” Maude whispered in the whimpering doctor’s ear. “You will never spread the poison of your seed and you will know pain in your lust for all your remaining days, may they be mercifully short. This is my judgment, Doctor.”

She released Tumblety and he fell over into the filth crying in agony. Dark stains soaked the front of his torn trousers. Maude picked up the cuffs and clamped them on him.

“He’s all yours,” Maude said to Kate. “Pray the law sees fit to do justice here, or I assure you I will. And you,” she said, turning to Rowan, “you and I will be talking again soon, and you are going to tell me everything.”

Kate reached down and dragged Tumblety by the manacles toward the edge of the alley, into the light. “I’d like to get your names as material witnesses,” she said. Kate looked up and Maude and Rowan were gone. She sighed and drove a sharp kick into the whimpering Tumblety’s side. “Just you and me, you charmer,” she said. “Story of my life.”

The Queen of Wands

The late morning sun fell across Auggie’s eyes. He groaned and opened them, blinking. Gillian, his wife, rested in the crook of his arm, her head on his hairy chest.

His wife.

Auggie smiled and regarded her while she still slept. Her narrow, perfect features, the long lashes of her closed eyes and the natural blush of her full lips. Auggie held the moment—the weight of her naked body against him, her deep, even breathing. He wanted to hold this moment forever, save every nuance of it in his mind and heart, so that it would sustain him, remind him when life was hard, or fleeting, that it had all been worth it, had been more joy than it ever was pain, more beauty than horror. This moment, this memory he could wrap himself in warm and deep, and let it carry him into the darkness, happy, content.

Gillian’s eyes fluttered open and she looked at him and smiled. “Good morning,” she said. “What are you staring at? I must look a fright.”

“You are the most beautiful sight I have ever seen,” Auggie said. “And I think the morning has almost left us. We have slept the day away, like rich lords and ladies,
ja
?”

They laughed, and Gillian pulled herself closer to Auggie’s chest, nuzzling into his neck.

“I never want to get out of this bed,” she said. “But Auggie, we were supposed to get back to work today. We took yesterday off. The store, my boarders and customers … I have to find out from Maude how her date with Mutt went.”

“It will keep,
meine Liebe
,” Auggie said with a growl. He turned his head and kissed her softly at first, then she joined him and the kiss became more passionate, deeper.

She moaned against his lips. “Oh, I do love you so, Augustus.”

“Whatever has been going on, will still be going on,” Auggie said. “If the whole town gets sucked down into a pot of molasses, or the devil comes looking to arm-wrestle the sheriff, it will keep and it’s not our problem, Gillian. I love you too.”

“It will keep,” she mumbled against his lips.

Husband and wife pulled themselves deeper and deeper into their kiss, their embrace. The world outside died to them. Nothing existed past the border of their love.

*   *   *

Gerta Shultz leaned against the wooden fence rail and watched with wonder as the sun climbed in the east, painting the desert in brilliant, breathtaking light. Every sunrise, every sunset was a miracle to her now, since she had been returned from the halls of the dead. It seemed her senses were much more acute than she recalled. Every detail shouted to her now. The colors seemed more vivid, everything did.

Gerta was technically in her early fifties, if you counted her life before this one, but she now looked and felt like she was in her twenties. Her pale skin had been oversensitive to the sun, but Clay’s treatments with his biorestorative formula had eased her discomfort and now the morning sunlight felt like a lover’s warm, familiar caress on her bare skin. Gerta raised her arms and her head skyward, almost shuddering in orgasm at the dawn’s touch.

“Uh … Gertie? You know you’re naked, darlin’?” Clay said as he approached her. “Somebody’s going to see you, even out here.”

Clay had given his men a few days off in preparation for the Thanksgiving holiday, which was only a few days away. Mr. Williams and most of Clay’s men had kin outside of Golgotha, so Clay paid them full for the week and sent them on their way home. The livery was empty except for him and Gertie. Clay had let her have his bedroom in the main house and he had been sleeping on his cot out in the barn.

Gertie blinked and turned to regard Clay as if she were coming out of a trance. Her body was alabaster and firm, her hair was black as pitch and fell below her shoulder blades. There were faint shadows of the stitches on her pale skin, but they were fading faster every day.

The old inventor looked away. He offered her a blanket and Gertie wrapped it about herself, shuddering at the coarse sensation of the fabric against her skin.

“I’m sorry, Clay,” she said. Her voice held a bit of her German accent, but less than in her old life. “It was just so … beautiful. I wanted to be part of it. I don’t know what got into me.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Clay said. “You’re getting used to your senses again and I’d hazard it’s a big difference between old eyes and young ones.”

“Almost intoxicating,” she said, huddling up close to him. “Everything is so much … more than I remember.”

“I got grub on in the house,” Clay said. “Hungry?”

“Very,” she said.

*   *   *

Clay watched in amazement as Gertie wolfed down more food. She had cleaned two plates of eggs, ham, gravy and biscuits. Still wearing only a blanket, she looked up and tilted her head, licking her lips clean of the gravy still on them.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” Clay said. “You sure got more of an appetite than I ever recall you having. Ravenous, even.”

“Is that … is that bad?” Gertie asked.

“Oh, hell no,” Clay said. “It’s a very good thing. Means that your body and your metabolism are kicking into full gallop. No, I love seeing you eat like that, Gertie. You’re so … alive.”

“I’m not a disappointment, am I?” she asked, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “I feel like I’m still me, I am just so excited by everything, Clayton! It’s like I’ve been in prison, locked away from the sun, and now I’ve been set free.” She took his hands in hers.

“I’m glad, Gertie,” Clay said, looking down. The feeling of skin touching his was so alien to him and yet it felt very, very good. “You are free.”

“Thanks to you,” she said.

Clay leaned forward. “How did you feel about the wedding yesterday?”

Gerta narrowed her eyes. “You think it upset me? Seeing Augustus and Gillian together?”

“I’ve never been able to figure out how or why people feel the way they do,” Clay said, “but I figure that had to cause you some distress.”

“Clay, I was dying,” Gerta said. “Augustus and I said our farewells. I told Gillian I wanted her to look after him and love him and she did. And then I was gone. The stubborn old knot hung on to me, the tattered old shreds of me, for far too long, with your help. But he finally set me free and decided to live again. And now thanks to you, I can do the same.

“No, I don’t regret one moment of my old life, but this is my new life, and Auggie and Gillian have a new life too.”